For millennia, the night sky was humanity’s readiest source of news and entertainment. The ancients watched the stars and the planets as avidly as we do television. Heavenly bodies were just that, bodies of the deities. Movements and changes in them indicated divine events. Ancient astronomer-priests took the art and science of sky-watching to the point where they could in fact predict the future—for example, lunar and solar eclipses. This required not only observation but also the mathematics necessary to correlate the movements of the Moon and Sun. Their sophistication gives lie to the condescending Hollywood gimmick wherein the white man, knowing that an eclipse is due, pretends to make the Sun disappear, thereby scaring the ignorant natives. The white men didn’t know half as much as the ancients and indigenous peoples did about the stars.
Van Gogh looked up into the starry sky and saw the swirls of God’s imagination. Three millennia earlier, Pythagoras listened to “the music of the spheres,” silent to the ears but not to the immortal soul. You know those rare and wonderful moments when you’re familiar with a composer but not the piece being played at the moment, and yet somehow you can sense where it’s going and how it will end? Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos are like that—listen to the first few, and the rest, though in no way derivative or redundant, just might unfold in your mind before the notes are played. Over the course of two dozen centuries of rapt connoisseurship, Mayan astronomer-priests developed an ear for how the music of the spheres played out, including the chords for disaster.
Prior to the 15th century, the Elders knew through the prophecies of the approaching invasion of the Spanish, which began on the first day of a cycle called the Belejeb Bolum Tiku (the Nine Darkness). This was a 468-year period consisting of nine smaller cycles of 52 years each, which lasted from August 17, 1519, until August 16, 1987 [the day of the Harmonic Convergence]. Because the Guardians of the Prophecies knew well in advance of the approaching invasion, they had ample time to prepare their communities. They informed the people about the effect the invasion would have on them, the sacred land and their traditional way of life. Part of the preparation included steps to ensure the protection of all the records, including the codices [sacred texts].
Most of the original Mayan codices, thousands of them, were burned during the first weeks of the Spanish conquest in 1519, by order of the Roman Catholic Church. Father Diego de Landa, who supervised the burning, was subsequently ordered by the king and queen of Spain to return to Guatemala and write a book summarizing Mayan beliefs. The resulting text, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Yucatán Before and After the Conquest), was full of cultural and factual distortions, not the least of which was the opening declaration that all Maya revered Jesus Christ, of whom few, at that point, had actually heard. Nonetheless, this book was the first text about the Maya in any Western language and therefore became the basis for virtually all Western scholarship on Mayan customs and beliefs, mistakes that have been compounded ever since.
It is widely written that only four Mayan codices survived the Spanish book-burning. What that means is that only four such codices are today known to be in Anglo-European hands. Many more sacred texts were saved by record-keepers and elders from different tribes who hid out in the mountains and remote areas. For more than twenty years, Gerardo Barrios visited villages in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico, searching out the descendants of these elders, some of whom still lived in the same caves in which their ancestors escaped the conquistadors. As they write in The Maya Cholqij, except for minor variations in language, “all of the calendars in use by traditional Mayan communities match up and continue the accurate record (count) of days that the Maya have been keeping for many thousands of years.” These texts were saved because the stars warned the Maya of the impending disaster headed for their culture. Now the Mayan calendar tells us that’s what’s ahead for the whole world.
On 12/21/12 our Solar System, with the Sun at its center, will, as the Maya have for millennia maintained, eclipse the view from Earth of the center of the Milky Way. This happens only once every 26,000 years. Ancient Mayan astronomers considered this center spot to be the Milky Way’s womb, a belief now supported by voluminous evidence that that’s where the galaxy’s stars are created. Astronomers now suspect that there is a black hole right at the center sucking up the matter, energy, and time that will serve as raw materials for the creation of future stars.
In other words, whatever energy typically streams to Earth from the centerpoint of the Milky Way will indeed be disrupted on 12/21/12, at 11:11 PM Universal Time, for the first time in 26,000 years. All because of a little wobble in the Earth’s rotation.
But why should a brief disruption of so distant a source as the center of the galaxy have any real consequences for our planet or its people? After all, we can go for days, weeks even, with no sunlight or moonlight without significant distress. The best analogy is the way that even a momentary disruption of electrical power can cause the clocks on VCRs and microwaves to go from keeping perfect time to blinking on and off meaninglessly until they are reset by hand. Our being even briefly cut off from the emanations from the center of the galaxy will, the Maya believe, throw out of kilter vital mechanisms of our bodies and of the Earth.
As I sidled gingerly down the steps of the Great Pyramid, I felt a pang for the chattering computer geeks. A sense of foreboding is in the air. We can all feel it, even those guys, and we can all find ways to deny those feelings, like by chattering nervously about anything but. Now it turns out that an ancient, obscure culture has for a good two millennia been predicting the date of apocalypse as 2012. There’s internal logic and precision to the Mayan thinking, and they’re sticking by the date. Denial has just become a little bit harder. Maybe a lot harder.
“Count to 100 and ask me if I’m Peter Pan.”
I’d pulled that old grade school prank too many times, struggling to keep a straight face while the sucker labored up through the count. Then finally the ridiculous question. The answer of course is no. Having spent thousands of dollars and hours to travel to Guatemala to climb up crumbling temples and now to meet with Mayan shamans, I wondered if it was my turn to be the sucker.
“Is the world going to end on December 21, 2012?”
“No. Not necessarily. It could all go quite smoothly, in theory,” replied Carlos Barrios, debonair graybeard shaman of the Mam, one of twenty-six Mayan tribes in Guatemala. We were in Arbol de Vita, a Guatemala City vegetarian restaurant owned by Tony Bono, brother of the late singer and congressman Sonny Bono. The décor of this beautiful place can best be described as Zen/Maya; on the far wall, a contemporary abstract sculpture of a snake-bird keeps tempting my eyes away from the conversation. The figure is Kukulcán, the Mayan version of Quetzlcoatl, the supreme Mesoamerican deity of light and heaven.
“People today are terrified. We live in an age of nuclear weapons, terror, plagues, natural disasters. The year 2012 has become a magnet for all those fears. It is being taken out of context by those who wish to play on people’s anxiety. We don’t see it as a time of destruction but rather as the birth of a new system,” explained Carlos in fluent Spanglish.
Birth, I observed, is accompanied by blood and agony.
“I have assisted at some births,” the shaman, a professional healer, gently reminded me.
Carlos has been on the shaman path since he was seventeen. He was driving his father’s car in the rural highlands when, through the dust, he saw several men in outlandish costume, Tibetan lamas, it turned out, performing a ceremony in the middle of a field. He jumped out of the car, ran over, and asked what was going on. A local shaman guiding the Tibetans tried to shoo Carlos away, but the lamas took pity. Carlos looked on in awe as they took four phallic-shaped ingots called lingams—one bronze, one copper, one silver, and one gold, about five pounds each—and buried them